Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Politix Update: It's Official, The Republican Party Has Finally Screwed The Pooch

With
the Iowa caucuses less than three weeks away and the New Hampshire primary hard on its heels, there is an essential truth in politics today that transcends all others: The Republican Party has finally screwed the pooch and is on a collision course with electoral Armageddon.

This
has become such common knowledge -- The New York Times climbed on board recently with a thumbsucker reading like the plot outline of Titanic -- that the problem for pundits like
myself in describing the party's self-immolation is to somehow sound new
and different. And wonder all the while why the heck the party is
unable to do anything beyond rearranging deck chairs as it steams full speed ahead toward that iceberg of a presidential election.

That
question is actually fairly easy to answer: The loyalists cognizant of
the GOP's parlous condition have been banished from its temple of
political purity, and what has become paramount to the forces that now
pretty much control the party is defending the five pillars of the temple -- rank
nativism, economic recidivism, nonsensical beliefs, an aversion to
governing and pathological fear of change. This is more important than
even winning big elections.

After the drubbing the party took in the 2012 presidential election, a Republican National Committee commission called the Growth and Opportunity Project brought forth
a brutally blunt 98-page report concluding that the GOP had become
smug, uncaring and so ideologically rigid that it was turning off a
majority of American voters with stale policies that had changed little
in 30 years and an image that was alienating to women, minorities and
the young.

This
call to modernize the party -- to develop "a more welcoming brand of
conservatism that invites and inspires new people to visit us," as the report concluded -- was ignored in its entirety.

§

At the heart of the of the Republican Party's malaise is a simple fact that has nothing to do with principles or identity: It has played a shell game with voters loyal to the GOP for years. Well, they're sick and tired of it, and is apparent, they're not going to take it anymore.

With mind-numbing regularity, the party establishment has assured its middle- and working-class loyalists that it has their best economic and social interests in mind, and then inevitably craps all over them by promoting tax cuts for the rich, deregulating Wall Street and corporations, and rolling over on culture war issues. This, more than anything, explains why rank-and-file conservatives are no longer willing to defer to party elites and have, in effect, staged a people's coup by elevating candidates like Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson who are not the playthings of of wealthy donors, banksters and
elected officials. It matters not that they're idiots.

Add to that opposition to immigration and panic over America's dramatically changing face, or what Lindsay Graham calls the GOP's "demographic death spiral," and the chances of the party coalescing around one candidate as it has typically done -- and even did when the party was sharply divided between supporters of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford in 1976 -- are somewhere between zero and none.

§

We need look no further than the 2008
nomination of Sarah Palin for vice president to understand when the Republican Party left the rails.

Seven
years on -- following two crushing defeats in presidential elections
and the likelihood of a third in November -- the destruction that the
former half-term governor of Alaska has wrought is immense. And
continues to grow. In a much-quoted Washington Post op-ed piece, former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley wrote that Palin set "a new standard" for the Republican Party that has gifted us Carson and Trump, among other buffoons:

"Once John McCain put Sarah Palin on the ticket, Republican 'grown-ups,' who presumably knew better, had to bite their tongues. But after the election, when they were free to speak their minds, they either remained quiet or abetted the dumbing-down
of the party. They stood by as Donald Trump and others noisily pushed
claims that Obama was born in Kenya. And they gladly rode the Tea Party
tiger to sweeping victories in 2010 and 2014. . . .

"It's
hard to feel much sympathy. The Republican establishment's 2008 embrace
of Palin set an irresponsibly low bar. Coincidence or not, a batch of
nonsense-spewing, hard-right candidates quickly followed, often to
disastrous effect."

Daley
may seem to be belaboring the obvious, but the deeply toxic effect that
this narcissistic, power abusing kook and liar (who now threatens to take on Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski out of sheer spite) has had on the GOP still
is not fully appreciated, and only barely so by historians as well as
Republicans who mourn the destruction of the GOP Big Tent and the
party's descent into pooch screwing.

Nor
is McCain's decision to invite Palin to join the ticket after spending
less than two hours with her (his man in charge of vetting veep nominees
never even met her face to face) properly understood to be the most
irresponsible decision in the history of presidential campaigns.

While it's easy to blame Palin for the state of the party, at first glance that state is a mixed bag.

Republicans are rich in statehouses and state legislatures (and generally did well in the November off-off-year elections),
firmly in control of the House and pretty much in control of the
Senate. But the party is poor where it matters most. It is no closer to
recapturing the White House than in 2012 and now arguably even further
from that goal. As considerable as the party's legislative and
congressional successes have been, they have had much to do with
gerrymandering and it is the big dance that counts the most. In that
respect, the party's record is awful because voters have elected
Democrats in four of the last five presidential elections, not including
the one thrown by the Supreme Court, prevailing by a 2-to-1 electoral
vote margin (1,446 to 706).

Palin
is not the only reason for the Republican Party's dysfunction, but her
toxic lip lock is evident in the hapless 2016 presidential campaign.

Taking into account the unelectability of frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, as well as
the rest of the still overcrowded field, no party has been in a weaker
position 10 months from a presidential election in the modern era. (And
please don't ask me what the modern era is; it just has a nice ring to
it.)

Sure,
the field will narrow and there will be considerable sorting out. But
it is the fat cats willing to bet buckets of money on their horse thanks to the largesse of Citizens United who
are keeping so many unqualified people in the race. Some 55 percent of
the party's registered voters tell pollsters they support candidates who
have zero experience in public service but still would entrust them
with running the government, maintaining America's place in the world . .
. oh, and carrying around the "nucular" football.

§

So a bit more than half of the Republican electorate insists that it
doesn’t want a Jeb Bushor Marco Rubio, the only people who
could conceivably challenge Hillary Clinton, and if Donald Trump
and Ted Cruz continue to lead the pack, there will be an irreconcilable split between
the party's donor class and the pitchfork brigade going into -- and after -- what party éminence grise Karl Rove concedes is likely to be the first brokered national nominating convention since 1948.

The consequences are these:

* A Trump or Cruz is denied the nomination. The establishment nominee faces an overwhelming Democratic edge and a spoilsport third party bid by a renegade candidate that spells a rout of Goldwater-like proportions.

* Trump or Cruz back into the nomination. The renegade nominee faces an overwhelming Democratic edge anda rout of Goldwater-like proportions as establishment Republicans stay home or cross over to the Democratic column.

Put yourself in the position of a long suffering establishment Republican factotum.

You've paid your dues and worked mighty hard to erase the nightmarish memory of Election Night 2012 when Rove melted down before millions of viewers on Fox News over his disbelief that Barack Obama had carried Ohio despite that call by his own network. And as the long night wore on, it became obvious that you and your pals had deluded themselves into believing that Mitt Romney was going to kick the president's Kenyan ass.

Here it is going on four years later and you have that same sinking feeling.All of that hard work, as well as heartburn from eating way too many pigs in a blanket at fundraising dinners, is going down the electoral toilet because of two deeply unelectable frontrunners that cannot be knocked from their perches.

There is a mysogonistic pretty boy endorsed by white supremacist groups who has descended deus ex machina from his Fifth Avenue penthouse to out-jive a field of once promising presidential prospects with an astonishing succession of inflammatory statements, as well as a foreign-born thug who shows not a scintilla of compassion, is loathed by his Senate colleagues, fond of using Nazi analogies in his solipsistic rants, and "is the most spectacular liar to ever run for president," in the words of one pundit.

IMAGE FROM DONKEYHOTEY/FLICKR. USED WITH PERMISSION. A CERTAIN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE SAYS THE PRINCESS BRIDE IS HIS FAVORITE MOVIE, AND SO HERE WE HAVE FIZZICK LIMBAUGH, RAFAEL VIZZINI AND TED "INIGO MONTOYA" CRUZ.

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About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.